When Karol G walked into Vogue’s podcast studio last week, she was mere days away from the start of Viajando por el Mundo Tropitour, a stadium tour that will take her across the US, Latin America, and Europe for the next year.
On today’s episode of The Run-Through, the Grammy winner and first Latina to headline Coachella tells Chloe Malle and guest host Ignacio Murillo, Vogue’s global talent casting director, that she built the show around the idea of the Latina showgirl. She’s been working since October with a full-time trainer, chef, and recovery specialist on a diet that’s less about restriction than precision, with plenty of carbs, minimal processed sugar, and six to eight supplements per meal. With six wardrobe changes and a stage built to span an entire stadium, her costume team adjusts her wardrobe roughly every two weeks as her body changes on the road; her biggest source of anxiety, she said, isn’t the choreography, but whether the audience’s energy matches her own.
Karol G is bringing her ambitious production to countries many stadium tours skip, including Peru, Guatemala, and Panama, even though moving the show by plane across Latin America—versus by truck across the US—is far more complicated, not to mention costly. But the tradeoff is worth it.
“For me, my Latina community, they were my first supporters,” Karol says. “So for me to keep bringing my show to all those places is super important.”
When it comes to fashion, Karol’s approach, developed over seven years with stylist Brett Alan Nelson, has shifted from simply chasing cool looks to using style to say something; this tour’s six segments variously pull from Etro, Roberto Cavalli, Gucci, and Chrome Hearts. She also opens up about family, crediting her musician father as her closest creative sounding board.
“We have a really close relationship,” Karol says. “I still send him music when I create and when I write songs. I’m like, ‘Pa, what do you think about this song?’”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Karol G confirms she’s done getting tattoos (her three honor Selena, Rihanna, and herself), says that she’s single and has never used a dating app, and names hot dogs and fries as her ideal first-date food. She’s also a karaoke spectator rather than performer, and her foundation, Con Cora, has spent more than five years funding schools, scholarships, and legal support for women facing domestic violence, incarceration, and immigration challenges—work she calls the counterweight to the emptiness that can come with public success. Viajando por el Mundo Tropitour kicks off in Chicago on July 24.
